intercourse that has stretched out for nine months, and an unprecedented melancholy stretching after it ...

3

And in the spring, when there were only two or three months left to wait, L. and I began to feel a general despondency. We felt very lonely without him. He was already living his separate life in L.—moving and pushing, while we were still far from him and languished in this strange separation. L., too, began to experience her growing isolation. Indeed, for a mother, the birth of a child is not only a meeting with him, but also, in some deepest carnal sense, parting for life. I used to stand aside, but now L. began to move away - she and I suddenly made up a company of lonely people. This is how the feeling of loneliness grows on a holiday, when everyone pours out into the street and you stay at home. As it became more and more lively where something unknown boiled and boiled, it became more and more dreary for us to be just the two of us. We were bored - and there was a real life. And how much more slowly our days dragged on in comparison with the centuries that flew by there!

This feeling of the incommensurability of his and our worlds is much stronger than ordinary age longing, tenderness of blooming childhood and regret about withering. In front of a baby you feel your old age, in front of the unborn - your unlife. And it pulled us away from here - to forget, to leave, to exchange tedious time for a trifle of a flashing space. We used a tried and tested way to dispel longing - Childe Harold's, Onegin's, with the only difference that they felt alone in front of nothingness, and the two of us - in front of the otherness of the third. But death-death and prenatal longings have much in common in this feeling of one's own uselessness, in nervous expectation, in the desire to dissipate. And then spring in the city did not begin in any way - it was already mid-April, but it was dark outside the window, sleet was falling, and these prenatal hardships of nature thickened languor, stirred and irritated. So we decided to go towards spring, as if accelerating its arrival and thereby internally approaching the denouement.

In the seventh month of waiting, we moved from Moscow to Riga, in order to begin a systematic descent to the south from there - up to Batumi, where we found ourselves already in the eighth month. From the Baltic Sea to the Black Sea, from Riga slime and icy hoarfrost - through cloudy Minsk, thawed Sumy, verdant Kharkov, dusty Rostov, blooming Gelendzhik - to azure-warm Batumi, shimmering in the sun: here all geography should be read as our biography. Because inside, in this nascent life, everything changed as quickly as outside, and it also warmed up, revived, blossomed, like symbols of the invisible, the visceral.

And in this fast-paced journey, where each city was given only a day or two, the road burned under our feet, the views stuck together and stuck to the pupils - we suddenly calmed down. Finally found a way of existence, worthy of a baby, commensurate with him! We stopped observing his indomitably striving life from the outside - and set off in pursuit, if not equal, then drawing closer to him in this thirst for renewal. Some kind of interaction - an act in response to an act - was established between us. He rushed through the centuries, we - through cities and villages; we lagged behind him in time, but carried him along in space.

This rivalry with a child in speed, in an aggressive and victorious sense of life - was it not a foreshadowing of future jealousies and strife between intra-family generations? Who knows! But now the main thing was to give him something that he, growing so confidently and taking everything from nature, did not I could take it myself. No longer wait for him to want to meet with us - prepare this meeting ourselves, open the world to him before he breaks his way there with his head. When we were deciding which city to show him, what color and image to throw into his subconscious, what sound to place in his memory, when we chose beautiful places for walking, kind people for conversation, creating a world of his future memories and vague recognitions, we were no longer together, but three of us, we were reunited with him. We have not only heard it, we have entered into communion with it. We had such a long meeting before his birth.

4

“And you are chasing a light spring, cutting through the air with your palm” [4 - O. Mandelstam. “I am in a round dance of shadows trampling on a gentle meadow ...”]. No, we were not only chasing spring on this journey, but we pursued - at least I - also a more specific goal: to visit the homeland of our ancestors. My father comes from Pogar, a small town in the Bryansk region, which did not accidentally fall into our free route halfway between Minsk and Sumy. I have long been drawn to these tattered roots of my kind, but only now, in anticipation of a baby, I was brought here by something higher than my own desire, by the power of an “arc stretch”: the beginning demanded to close with the end. And inот я, по стечению обстоятельстin — in день сinоего рождения, 2one апреля стою in центре Погара, на земле, исхоженной предками, и чего-то жду, на что-то надеюсь — слоinно in благодарность за то, что я приехал сюда, ко The local nature must move towards me, hug me, greet me like a native, or at least give a secret sign of recognition: this is your foundation and soil!

It was an early, tender spring, and the dust on the road was already swirling in clouds from passing cars. This flaking of the earth, this turbidity of the air - in the custom of such semi-village towns, where the earth loses its healthy fat content and lumpiness - it dries up, gets sick, sprayed. It was not the soil under my feet, but the dust, the "dust of the fatherland", which tightened my face with a sticky mask.

From the synagogue, where my great-grandfather served as a rabbi, nothing, of course, remained. But the church was preserved, where none of my ancestors went; but even such accuracy with a minus sign was precious to me. Actually, I did not expect to acquire any other knowledge, except for negative ones, because neither the place of the house was known to me, nor the previous layout of the city - nothing. In fact, I came to find out what not this was the place for my ancestors. But I knew this with alarming accuracy.

We have traveled a lot before: we have been in the North, and in the Urals, and on the Volga, in the most abandoned towns, the most garbage settlements, but we have never met such terrible, inhuman faces as here. On Mglinskaya Street, where the synagogue used to stand, I accidentally met the eyes of a teenager - and was horrified: such animal muteness and indifferent anger in him. Not to me, not to someone else, but anger in general: to the air, houses, trees. A burning, cutting look - it cut me and slid further, leaving behind a bloody swollen streak. For some reason, teenagers in such places are remembered most of all - the degree of hopelessness, murder in them is sharper, or something. Children almost don't care where they live, they are joyful everywhere; adults are already firmly nailed to their place, but in teenagers something else stubbornly writhes until life cuts them down ...

I remember another one: freckled, red, with disheveled hair, wearing glasses that are rare here. He walked among his peers, standing out for his stoop, outlandish hair color - a timid peacock in a flock of wild and vicious ducks. He had that expression of bewilderment and awkwardness which gives even a stupid face an expression of intelligence. And at the same time I caught a sort of impudent and pathetic attempt to be like everyone else - he was laughing at something and chopping the air with his hand, as if destroying an invisible enemy. And my heart sank from the defenselessness of the local soul, from the impossibility of being fulfilled in my own way. Her only choice is between the scary and the pathetic. I suddenly recognized myself in this red-haired teenager - yes, there were redheads in our family. My father would have stayed here, married a local, and it was me, his son, returning from school, content to be listened to and not beaten or teased. Next year I will enter a car repair college or a financial school ... Loyalty to the family, covenants, land! waking up from a terrible dream, when my present finally separated from this possible twist of fate.

And by the evening of that day spent at home, almost before my departure, the long-awaited "sign" happened to me - addressed directly and personally to me. In a deserted shop where we we went to buy groceries on the road, a huge fellow approached me - he moved close, swaying measuredly, and uttered unbelievably correctly, but without any expression: "Intellectual, it seems?" I almost answered, as courtesy requires:

“Yes, I am so-and-so, what can I serve?” But he did not wait for an answer -